Can you give me any ideas on what activities I could use to get students to practise using the vocabulary for occupations? The vocabulary (plumber, architect etc..) will be new to them so I need to find a way of getting them to use it and remember it after having given them the vocab.

You haven’t said what level or age the students are so I’m guessing they’re beginner adults.

There are many activities you could do, depending on what exactly your goal is. You could use a crossword puzzle to practise spelling. The clues could either be simple definitions of the job or picture prompts, depending on the level of your students. A word search would provide similar practice. If your students are at a higher level, you could have them create a word search or crossword puzzle. Once games are complete, other students in the class can solve them.

You can play a variety of guessing games to practise pronunciation. For example, a student imagines that he or she is a plumber; the others in the group ask “are you an architect, lawyer, etc?” Students can either pick occupations at random or they take a card indicating the occupation from a pile. Students score points for correct answers. You could also use a variation on the game of Happy Families”. In this game players hold seven cards and the objective is to get a set of four cards that represent the same occupation. To do this students ask the person on their right “have you got a baker? Can I have it please?” You would need to pre-teach these phrases and practise pronunciation first. You would also need to demonstrate the game to the whole class.

It would also be useful to give some written work for homework and to review the vocabulary in the following lesson.